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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

As reported by the Denver Post: Colorado is set to
become the first state in the country to legislatively authorize
ride-sharing services offered by UberX and Lyft.

The Senate on Tuesday approved a House-amended version of Senate Bill 125 that closes the controversial insurance gap, sending the bill to Gov. John Hickenlooper's desk.

Hickenlooper's
office has urged lawmakers to pass the much-debated measure because
without it, Lyft and UberX would be forced to cease operations in the
state, dealing a blow to Colorado's reputation as an innovation hub.

SB
125 officially would authorize the services and place Lyft, UberX
and other so-called transportation network companies, or TNCs, under
limited state regulation.

Lawmakers in Arizona, California and
Illinois also have taken up the issue of regulating ride-share
companies. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed her state's bill last week
because of concerns about insurance coverage and lack of drug testing
for drivers.

Ride-sharing drivers use their personal cars for
fares and connect with passengers via smartphone apps. Fares generally
are lower than taxi service. Taxi officials have argued the TNCs have
an unfair advantage because they don't face the same regulations.

The
final version of SB 125 requires car-sharing companies, or their
drivers, to carry primary commercial insurance coverage for the period
when a driver has logged into their Lyft or UberX app but hasn't been
hailed. Insurers had threatened to raise rates if they were forced to
cover that period with a driver's personal auto policy, arguing that the
driver is engaged in commercial activity at that point.

"We were
able to address that critical issue in making sure there were no gaps
in coverage during the commercial activity, at least for liability
coverage," said Kelly Campbell, a lobbyist with Property Casualty
Insurers Association of America.

The bill allows TNCs to carry
contingent coverage — which kicks in if a driver's personal policy
doesn't cover damages — for the gap period until Jan. 15. At that
time, the gap coverage has to be primary, either through the driver or
the TNC.

SB 125 also requires TNCs to provide primary liability
coverage between the time a fare has been hailed and the passenger has
been dropped off.

"We look forward to Gov. Hickenlooper signing
the bill to secure a future that will allow ride-sharing to grow and
thrive in the state of Colorado for years to come," Lyft said in a
statement.

Uber, the parent company of UberX, still has some
concerns about certain regulatory controls the state will have over the
ride-sharing service.

"All in all, it's a very good thing that
this legislature cleared the way for TNCs to operate in Colorado," Uber
attorney Greg Sopkin said.

Lyft launched service in Denver in
September, with UberX following a few weeks later. Lyft has since
expanded to Colorado Springs.

"We're the first in the nation to
legislatively authorize this," Uber attorney Ray Gifford said. "That
should be a point of pride for Colorado."

As reported by Chron: Divers scoured the bottom of Lake Conroe in the hope of recovering a controversial $250,000 police drone that crashed into the water Friday. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office confirmed the remote-controlled helicopter drone, which was bought in 2011 with a federal grant, suffered a malfunction and went down during an exercise over the lake.

The drone is equipped with a camera and an infrared scanning device and is used by MCSO for emergency management, missing-person recovery and operation overwatch, for example filming above SWAT team activities, spokesman Brady Fitzgerald said.

"Divers did go down to look for it. They are still looking. It went down in deep water where there is a rocky bottom. Visibility is also a problem because of sediment at the bottom of the lake," Fitzgerald said.

The mini helicopter, which weighs around 49 pounds, and, in a military setting, could be fitted with a single- or multiple-shot 40mm grenade launcher, 25mm grenade launcher or 12 gauge shotgun, according to Vanguard Defense Industries.

Civil liberties organizations were critical when the ShadowHawk drone was purchased from Vanguard just over two years ago.

At the time, Kirsten Bokenkamp, spokeswoman for the Houston-based American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the drones raise concerns because there are not enough safeguards in place to protect citizens from unreasonable search and seizure.

"It's just another example of technology that is outstripping our lives," she said. "What we mean by that, is the technology moves so quickly and the interpretations of the Fourth Amendment are failing to keep up with the technology. That brings privacy concerns."

MCSO officials emphasize that the drone is not used for surveillance.

Drones or unmanned aircraft are governed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which first authorized their use in the national airspace in 1990.

Fitzgerald said deputies were confident the drone would be recovered and further investigation into the crash would follow.The Drone is reportedly over the FAA's 25 pound weight limit, so it's likely they shouldn't have been flying it in the first place. Recently passed Texas Legislature (House Bill 912) also restricts the use of drones to observe private property.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

From the FCC: "An individual who had been jamming cellphone traffic on interstate 4 in Florida was located by FCC agents with the assistance of Hillsborough County Sheriff's Deputies. The individual had reportedly been jamming cellphone traffic on I-4 for two years.The FCC is nowproposing a $48,000 fine for his actions. They say the jamming 'could and may have had disastrous consequences by precluding the use of cell phones to reach life-saving 9-1-1 services provided by police, ambulance, and fire departments.'" While the fine is large, it is not unprecedented: last August (2013) a New Jersey man named Gary Bojczak, who worked for a construction company in Northern New Jersey was fined $32K for an illegal GPS jamming device that disrupted the Newark airport system on multiple occasions. The FAA and FCC spent two years (March 2009 to April 2011) locating the source of the jamming at Newark Airport.Wireless jamming is considered to be more than an inconvenience or nuisance, and is treated as a significant threat since it can disrupt critical and emergency communications, terrestrial and satellite communication such as GPS tracking systems that are required for everything from aircraft, personal or vehicular location to systems requiring financial trading. It can also potentially affect military operations.As GPS can be negatively impacted over a wide area by a relatively small jammer, alternative technologies such as eLoran and MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) are being investigated as a secondary location signal provider. This will only continue to be more critical as self driving vehicles, commercial drones and intelligent highway system usage continues to expand.

Sprint lost a net total of 231,000 postpaid subscribers (which
includes contract and non-contract subscribers who aren’t on a
pay-as-you-go plans) and 364,000 prepaid subscribers. The bright spot
was a gain in 212,000 wholesale subscribers, reflecting Sprint’s growing
business in connecting mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) like Tracfone, FreedomPop, Ting and Republic Wireless.
The revenue it brings in from an MVNO subscriber, however, is a
fraction of what it sees from a customer who buys mobile service
directly from Sprint.

Source: SprintSprint Total SubscribersTotal Period SubscribersQ12012Q22012Q32012Q42012Q12013Q22013Q32013Q42013Q1201453M54M55M56M57M

Sprint executives blamed the subscriber loss on the tumult created by its ongoing network overhaul. Sprint isn't just trying to bring its LTE network coverage on par with its competitors,
but it’s also rebuilding its 2G and 3G CDMA networks from scratch.
Service disruptions caused by that upgrade work are causing disgruntled
customers to leave, Sprint said.

Still, there are some glimmers of light at the end of this tunnel.
Sprint’s LTE network now reaches 225 million people in 443 cities, so
it’s within spitting distance of its mid-year goal of 250 million people
covered. And while Framily didn't stem customer losses this quarter,
nearly 3 million subscribers signed up for the new friends and family
plan last quarter. That’s significant but those customers are not only
more likely to stick with Sprint in the future, but they’re likely to
recruit new subscribers into the Sprint fold.Framily’s incentive structure offers an increasing discount
as more people join a particular plan. Since Sprint will bill each
subscriber separately, Sprint can use Framily to target customers
outside of a traditional family plan. These customers aren't on
contract, so they’re free to leave when they pay off their phone, but
they’ll lose their accrued discounts. So if a “Framily” loses members it
has a lot of incentive to replace them. At a separate event Tuesday,
Sprint attempted to amplify the benefits of Framily by offering members discounts on Spotify’s subscription music streaming service.

Sprint now has 54.9 million total subscribers, making it half the size of AT&T and Verizon. It reported a first quarter net loss of $151 million, compared to a $643 million loss in Q1 of 2013, off of revenue of $8.88 billion.

As reported by The Verge: Last week, Saudi Arabia bought its first drone fleet, according to a dispatch from Tactical Reports.
Saudi Crown Prince Salman met with Chinese General Wang Guanzhong to
sign a contract for a shipment of Chinese Wing Loong drones, also known
as Pterodactyls. The drones that make up the shipment are designed to
mimic America's Predator drone, with surveillance capabilities and
enough lift to carry two matched air-to-ground missiles.If the report is true, it means
Saudi Arabia may have joined an exclusive club, one of the few nations
with armed, unmanned aircraft. It's a group that, to date, includes just
the US, Britain, Israel, China, and (depending who you ask) Iran — but beyond those countries, the capability is increasingly available to whoever can pay for it. At the Singapore Air Show
earlier this year, both Israel and China were showing off their wares
to would-be clients, including the Pterodactyl drone named in the
report, and you could find similar displays at dozens of other air shows.
With American counterterrorism efforts providing an ongoing test of how
valuable the machines can be, there are lots of countries willing to
buy.

The US is still responsible for the vast majority of drone strikes, but that may have more to do with politics than capability. A GAO report from 2012
found that more than 75 countries have some form of drone system. Most
are unarmed but some, like the systems used in Australia, Japan, and
Singapore, could be retrofitted for military purpose. More importantly,
the US’ use of drones — more than 50 strikes in 2013 alone
— seems to have whetted a global appetite for combat drones. "If you
think of this as part of a broader trend of the proliferation of
military robotics, then the idea that we were going to have a monopoly
on this kind of technology was always a bit far-fetched," says
University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michael Horowitz. "The
American monopoly on drones is over and probably never really existed."

International trade barriers
have slowed down the spread, but they haven’t stopped it. For US
companies, combat drones are controlled under the same agreement as
cruise missiles, through an association called the Missile Technology
Control Regime. But China and Israel aren't part of the group, and the
two countries have begun aggressively marketing drone systems to
outsiders eager to keep up with US capabilities. One report from the
consulting firm Frost & Sullivan estimated that Israel had exported
$4.6 billion in drone systems between 2005 and 2012.

Experts also say Saudi Arabia
has previously demonstrated both the interest and the budget for this
kind of purchase. "Saudi Arabia and smaller countries like the UAE are
trying to get their hands on whatever they can, and the US has pretty
restrictive export policies," says Cornell University professor Sarah
Kreps, who studies drone proliferation. The result leaves China as one
of the only sources available in town.

One of the biggest questions is
whether the new generation of foreign drones can match US capabilities.
"We don't know at all about the quality of the pterodactyl," Kreps
cautions, "these aren't combat-tested." Since unmanned aircraft rely so
heavily on satellite and communications infrastructure, it’s hard to
tell from the craft alone how well it will perform in the field. The
Pterodactyl is also typically sold for a fraction of the price of the
Predator, which has only fueled skepticism.

But even if China needs help
to bring its drones up to US standards, that expertise may not be hard
to find. UAVs are built on mostly commercial technology, drawing from
the robotics and aviation industries. That’s much harder to keep under
wraps than military tech like warheads or missiles. As long as there’s a
market, there’ll be an incentive to build cheaper and more powerful
drones, and the club of drone-armed countries will continue to grow. As
Horowitz puts it, "What we know about the history of military technology
suggests it will be really difficult to keep a lid on this."

As reported by GigaOm: Google says its self-driving car is now proficient at navigating the hazards of city driving.In a blog post,
Chris Urmson, director of the company’s self-driving car project, wrote
that the Google cars have successfully completed 700,000 miles of city
driving — around Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters —
without incident:

“We’ve
improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects
simultaneously — pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing
guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A
self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way
that a human physically can’t — and it never gets tired or distracted.”

As of the last status update in August, the cars had completed
300,000 miles of service without an accident, at least under computer
control — an actual person also sits in the car — but those miles were
logged in a variety of conditions. Now Google seems to have doubled down
on city driving, which presents more variable conditions than highway
driving.While this post is interesting, the comments are even more
intriguing. One commenter predicted an increase in unsafe driving
practices by human drivers who will now be tempted to cut off the Google
cars, if they’re so darned accurate. Another requested an “On-Board Missile Launcher” option, perhaps to deter or punish such cutoffs and counter road rage.
While negotiating Mountain View roads may be tricky, Google needs
talk to me after the cars have mastered the potholes, rotaries and
creative drivers of Boston. Now that would really be something.

Monday, April 28, 2014

As reported by Tech Times: Drivers may soon be able to put away their buckets and cleaning rags after Nissan announced that it has developed a car that can clean itself instantly using a special kind of paint. Engineers at Nissan's European Technical Center in Bedfordshire, England applied a "super-hydrophobic" and "lipophobic" paint finish called Ultra-Ever Dry, which was developed and patented by UltraTech International, on the new Nissan Note supermini. The ultra-resistant paint can repel water and oils, as well as dirt, dust, mud and grit.

Although Ultra-Ever Dry has been used in other fields, Nissan claims that this is the first application of the special paint on automotive bodywork.

The paint uses nanotechnology to create a thin air shield above the surface of the car that makes rain, road spray, frost, sleet and standing water roll off the car without tainting its surface at all.

"By creating a protective layer of air between the paint and environment, it effectively stops standing water and road spray from creating dirty marks on the car's surface," explains Nissan in a press release.

So far, initial tests conducted on the self-cleaning Note were effective. Nissan engineers used Ultra-Ever Dry to paint one side of the car and regular paint on the other side. A video below shows how the side of the Note coated with Ultra-Ever Dry did not accumulate mud or dirt.

"The Nissan Note has been carefully engineered to take the stress out of customer driving, and Nissan's engineers are constantly thinking of new ways to make families' lives easier," says Nissan chief marketing manager Geraldine Ingham.

Nissan says it has no plans of making the special paint job a standard on factory models. It will, however, consider offering the self-cleaning paint as an aftermarket option. The company also promised to continue testing the technology in its European testing center.

This is not the first time Nissan introduced a self-cleaning function. The company has already developed a smart rear-view mirror that provides a better back view using a camera piped on the rear windshield. This camera is equipped with its own "wash and dry" function that uses water and air to keep the lens free from dust and dirt, allowing the driver a clear view of what's behind the car at all times.

As reported by GigaOm: Resistance to cloud computing might not be futile, but it’s at least
beginning to look foolish — especially as services from the top
providers such as Amazon Web Services keep getting cheaper
while their performance gets better. It’s also looking like
smaller-scale or “enterprise” cloud platforms will have to promise some serious differentiation in order to justify their higher costs.To highlight this trend, here’s a chart from publishing analytics
startup Parse.ly graphing its IT spending from inception until early
2014.

The long story made short — you can read the whole thing up through September 2013 here
— is that Parse.ly started off using Rackspace primarily and AWS for
backup and a variety of ad hoc workloads (e.g., Hadoop jobs). In 2012, it
opted to cut costs by switching its primary analytic database to
physical servers in a co-location center while continuing to run its
cloud workloads primarily in Rackspace. In late 2013, it began
transitioning more workloads to AWS and completed an entire transition
to AWS in late February 2014.After paying double (to both Rackspace and AWS) during the
transition, Parse.ly is now paying less than monthly than it was before
making the move. Its spending patterns might be unique because of the
workloads it’s running, but they’re compelling nonetheless.And, Parse.ly Co-founder and CTO Andrew Montalenti told me, there’s
icing on this cake, as well: “What’s crazy is we got a speed-up and
saved money.” The company’s primary analytics database is now running
significantly faster on AWS SSD-backed instances than it did on bare
metal (albeit hard-disk-backed) servers.If recent claims from Google about adjusting its pricing in accordance with Moore’s Law
come true — and if its unique strategy around price reductions on
long-running instances catches on — we should be in for continually
lower prices on basic cloud computing services. AWS is the cloud king,
but Google and Microsoft are positioned as strong contenders, and if low
costs are what wins users, they’ll all play along to ensure no one else owns that story. The same goes for improved performance and rapid feature updates.More and more, it looks like the future of cloud computing will be renting the infrastructure that lets users operate like, well, Amazon, Google and Microsoft but at a fraction of the cost (and scale). We’ll hear a lot more about where the industry is heading at the Structure conference, which takes place June 18 and 19 in San Francisco, and features, among many others, Google’s Urs Hölzle, Amazon’s Werner Vogels and Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie.

As reported by GigaOm: T-Mobile has begun upgrading its LTE network with a new kind of
antenna technology that will help fix one of the biggest problems in
mobile: the inconsistent signals and connection speeds our phones see as
we move through the mobile network.

Anyone who has ever had five bars and a rocking data link to the
tower, only to lose it 20 yards later, can attest to this. But starting
in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio, T-Mobile users will soon see those
peaks and valleys become plateaus.

The technology is called 4-by-2 multiple input-multiple output, or
4×2 MIMO. You may already be familiar with MIMO if you’re familiar with
how LTE or Wi-Fi works: multiple antennas send multiple parallel
transmissions from the transmitter to the device. While nearly all LTE
systems today use 2×2 MIMO — two antennas at the tower connecting to two
antennas in the phone — T-Mobile is doubling up on spatial streams
being transmitted over the network.

What that means is that there will be a lot more signals flying at
your T-Mobile 4G phone, tablet or mobile hotspot, ensuring you can get a
better downlink connection even if you’re at the fringes of the network
or their obstacles between you and the tower. The biggest benefits will
be on the return trip, though. With more antennas at the tower to pick
up your phone’s generally weaker signals, you’ll get a big boost in your
uplink connection.

Gigaom first got the scoop on T-Mobile’s plans
last June, when one of its vendors Nokia Solutions and Networks
confirmed to me T-Mobile planned on deploying the antenna array
technology. At the time, T-Mobile wouldn’t even acknowledge that it was
using 4×2 MIMO, but this week T-Mo VP of Technology Mark McDiarmid
confirmed to me that T-Mobile is in the process of rolling it out in
multiple cities across its network this year as part of a larger LTE
upgrade.

“We do see the benefits 4×2 MIMO offers and will be deploying this in
many cities in 2014 as part of our Wideband LTE rollout,” McDiarmid
said in a statement to Gigaom. “All of T-Mobile’s available devices
currently support 4×2 MIMO and we’ll ensure that new devices will as
well. We believe this will be one of the first deployments by a top
carrier network in the US.”

Source: Flickr / swruler9284

Sprint is performing trials of a similar technology called 8T8R,
which actually creates eight transmit paths as opposed to T-Mobile’s
four, and will incorporate it into future upgrades to its new tri-band Spark network.

Historically T-Mobile has always trailed its competitors when it comes
to launching new generations of network technologies. It was the last to
get 3G and the last to start rolling out LTE, but once it had gotten
started it took advantage of its newer network equipment to surpass its
rivals. It built the fastest 3G network in the U.S. in 2011, and with 4×2 MIMO its now among the pioneers in one of the latest advancements in 4G networking.

What does this mean to me?

So if you’re a T-Mobile subscriber with an LTE handset, 4×2 MIMO
basically means you’re going to get a more resilient connection as you
move throughout the network. You won’t actually see your peak speeds
improve, but you’ll be able to maintain a fast, consistent connection
far more often, even when the network starts getting crowded.

According to Nokia networks’ Head of Technology for North America
Petri Hautakangas, at the cell edge – those fringe areas of the network
where your connection often suffers the most — you could see a 50
percent to 60 percent boost in download speeds and as much as 100
percent increase in upload speeds.

That boost provides a lot of advantages to T-Mobile as well as its
customers. By connecting more customers throughout its network with
faster speeds it increases its overall data capacity considerably,
meaning it will take a lot more traffic to make its network congested.

As for where the network heads next, the location of the three
sightings we've had so far provides a hint. They’re all Nokia-built
networks. Nokia’s systems are concentrated in the interior of the U.S.
Ericsson holds T-Mobile’s contract for most east and west coast cities.
If Nokia has the jump on Ericsson for this new technology, then it might
take a while before it arrives in New York or San Francisco.

In any case, this technology is an important step for mobile networking, demonstrating the subtle shift away from building faster networks, to building better networks.
The 5-10 Mbps speeds we typically see on a smartphone today is plenty
fast. But providing a consistent 5-10 Mbps connection no matter where
you go in the network? That’s where the mobile industry should be
heading.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) weighed in through its "Competition Matters" blog, making
it plain that the agency supports the Tesla direct sales approach,
likening it to past technological advances in consumer-business
relations.

"In this case and others, many state and local regulators have
eliminated the direct purchasing option for consumers, by taking steps
to protect existing middlemen from new competition. We believe this is
bad policy for a number of reasons," wrote Andy Gavil, Debbie Feinstein,
and Marty Gaynor in the FTC's "Who decides how consumers should shop?" posting to the Competition Matters blog.

The strong statement of policy is not a change to any law or regulation,
but it does clearly indicate the FTC's stance on the matter. Gavil is
the director of the FTC's Office of Policy Planning, Feinstein is
director of the Bureau of Competition, and Gaynor is director of the
Bureau of Economics.

The post continues, "Dealers contend that it is important for regulators
to prevent abuses of local dealers. This rationale appears unsupported,
however, with respect to blanket prohibitions of direct sales by
manufacturers. And, in any event, it has no relevance to companies like
Tesla. It has never had any independent dealers and reportedly does not
want them."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has explained why Tesla doesn't want conventional car dealers in the past. Though noting that it would be an easier path for
Tesla, Musk thinks that conventional car dealers would have a conflict
of interest in conveying the benefits of electric cars, since they would still rely on conventional (gasoline-burning) cars for the majority of their sales and profits.

Tesla's battle for direct sales is framed by existing franchise laws
that prohibit anyone not licensed as a car dealer from selling vehicles
to the public. Laws vary from state to state, but in all, 48 states have
some version of the restriction.

The FTC appears to take issue not with those laws, but with how they're
being used, and with the direct-sales bans being passed in several
states.

"Regulators should differentiate between regulations that truly protect
consumers and those that protect the regulated," the post continued.

Tesla now has more than 50 stores and galleries in the U.S., with six
more due to open soon. Over 40 service centers are also currently in
operation, with another 23 planned.

As reported by GigaOm: Last week the Federal Communications Commission laid out all of its proposed rules
for next year’s controversial broadcast airwave incentive auction, save
one. It didn't address the most contentious rule of them all: whether
the countries’ two mega-carriers AT&T and Verizon will have free
rein in the auction or face restrictions on how many airwaves they can
buy.The FCC is now taking a whack at the political piñata, and AT&T
and Verizon aren't going to be pleased with what comes out. On Thursday,
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler began circulating proposed rules for low-band
spectrum auction — of which the incentive auction is most definitely one
— that would limit Verizon and AT&T’s ability to bid on all
licenses in markets where competition for frequencies is particularly intense.

What that means is that in areas where there’s the most demand for mobile
broadband airwaves, such as the big cities, the FCC will set aside up to
30 MHz of airwaves for carriers that don’t already own a lot of
low-band spectrum. The rules aren’t exactly a surprise since Wheeler has
been leaning in this direction for months, though they’re likely to get
overshadowed by the FCC’s controversy du jour, net neutrality.The reason low-band spectrum is valuable is because of its
propagation — it can reach out long distances in rural areas and punch
through walls in dense metro areas. Most of the low-band spectrum in use
in the U.S. today is owned by, you guessed it, Verizon and AT&T,
both of which have tapped 700 MHz for the backbones of their LTE
networks.Wheeler elaborated in the FCC’s blog:

“… two national carriers
control the vast majority of that low-band spectrum. This disparity
makes it difficult for rural consumers to have access to the competition
and choice that would be available if more wireless competitors also
had access to low-band spectrum. It also creates challenges for
consumers in urban environments who sometimes have difficulty using
their mobile phones at home or in their offices.

To address this problem, and to prevent one or two wireless providers
from being able to run the table at the auction, I have proposed a
market based reserve for the auction.”

The nitty grittyThe way the auction would work under the FCC’s proposal is that in
any given market, all carriers would bid freely for these 600 MHz
airwaves. But after bidding hits a particular trigger point indicating
high demand for those licenses, the FCC would basically split the
auction in two, creating a reserve chunk of airwaves up to 30 MHz that
only smaller carriers like Sprint, T-Mobile and regional operators could
bid on. The unreserved portion would remain open to all bidders.Verizon and AT&T wouldn’t necessarily face restrictions in every
market. It all depends on the extent of their low-band holdings in any
given region. There are even a few geographical cases where regional
carriers like U.S. Cellular hold enough 700 MHz spectrum that they would
be excluded from the reserve camp, FCC officials said.

The rules certainly aren't final. In May they go before the full
commission, which will decide on specific mechanisms such as which
auction stage reserve bidding would be triggered and what percentage of
licenses in any given market could be reserved. It could also change up
the rules entirely, easing restrictions on AT&T and Verizon, or toss
them out entirely. Those carriers are putting a lot of political
pressure on the FCC and Congress for an entirely open auction, and
AT&T even threatened to sit the whole auction out.AT&T may just be bluffing,
but the threat has to give the FCC some pause. A major bidder sitting
out the auction wouldn’t just mean less revenue for the government, it
could cause the entire auction to fail. The way this complex auction is
structured (I spell out all the details here), the broadcasters currently using the UHF band would agree to part with their TV channels,
but only if their selling prices are met. The fewer bidders there are
to buy those repurposed airwaves, the less likely the auction will meet
those prices.We’re still a year away
from the first bids being placed, and it’s becoming increasingly clear
there’s no way the FCC is going to be able to make happy all the various
broadcasters, carriers, politicians and public interest groups
involved. It’s just a question of whether it can make enough of them
happy to actually pull the auction off.

As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek: Elon Musk’s space company will sue
the U.S. Air Force to protest a Lockheed Martin Corp.-Boeing Co. team’s monopoly on Pentagon satellite launches, the billionaire
said today.“These launches should be competed,” he told reporters at
the National Press Club in Washington. “If we compete and lose,
that is fine. But why would they not even compete it?” Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as
SpaceX, is trying to break the joint venture’s lock on U.S.
military satellite launches, which have an estimated value of
$70 billion through 2030. He has said competition in that market
may save taxpayers more than $1 billion a year. Video: SpaceX's Musk News Conf.: Falcon 9, Launch Lawsuit

Also today, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican,
asked the Pentagon’s inspector general in a letter to
investigate developments in the Air Force’s launch program. He
questioned the lack of competition in the program.

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, plans to file its
suit Monday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It seeks to
reopen competition for a military contract to joint venture
United Launch Alliance LLC for 36 rocket cores, said Ian
Christopher McCaleb, senior vice president at Levick, a public
relations firm representing SpaceX.Taxpayer CostThe Air Force agreed to the bulk purchase of the main
rocket components last year in an attempt to hold down costs. “This contract is costing U.S. taxpayers billions of
dollars for no reason,” said Musk, who earlier today made a
presentation at the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s annual conference.Mark Bitterman, a spokesman for United Launch Alliance,
said the military’s “robust acquisition and oversight
process,” as well as the company’s improved performance, led to
$4 billion in savings compared with prior acquisition
approaches. The joint venture recognizes the Pentagon’s “plan to
enable competition and is ready and willing to support missions
with same assurance that we provide today,” Bitterman said in
an e-mail. Matthew Stines, an Air Force spokesman, said in an e-mail
that the service has “no formal statement” on Musk’s
announcement of the SpaceX lawsuit.Russian EnginesSpaceX will require three successful launches as part of
the process to win U.S. certification, the service has said.
Technical reviews and audits of the proposed rockets, ground
systems and manufacturing process also are needed, according to
the Air Force.

Musk, also chairman and chief executive officer of Tesla
Motors Inc., told U.S. lawmakers last month that the Lockheed-Boeing venture’s Atlas V rockets uses engines from Russia,
posing supply risks following the country’s invasion of Crimea
in Ukraine. The U.S. and Europe have been considering a possible
expansion of sanctions against Russia. Pentagon officials have asked the Air Force to review
whether the use of Russian engines for the military launches
poses a national security risk.

Friday, April 25, 2014

As reported by GigaOm: The Federal Communications Commission doesn't want companies like
Netflix or Viacom to have to pay to get their content to end users of
broadband networks, but it doesn't see a way (or maybe even a reason) to
ban the practice.In a call with reporters on Thursday, FCC officials
laid out the agency’s thinking on new network neutrality rules and tried to address concerns that the internet as we know it is broken.The agency’s hope is to have new rules in place by the end of this
year, and it plans to release a public document called a Notice of
Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) outlining its thinking and asking questions
about the new rules. It plans to release this NPRM in three weeks at its
May 15 open meeting. Once the documents are released, the public will
have a chance to comment on them.What was once unreasonable discrimination now becomes commercially unreasonable

Since some of the content of that document was released Wednesday,
the media and public interest groups have been concerned about what the
new network neutrality framework would allow — namely, how the agency
planned to ensure that ISPs won’t discriminate against the packets
flowing across their networks. The answer? The agency will replace the
“unreasonable discrimination” clause from the original net neutrality rules that were defeated in court this year with standards associated with “commercial reasonableness.”It’s a subtle shift, but an important one. When the U.S. Court of
Appeals gutted the Open Internet Order that set forth the net neutrality
rules in January, it did so on the basis that the agency didn’t use the right justification
for its rules. It tried to turn ISPs into common carriers and regulate
them that way, but the court declared that the FCC couldn’t put that
burden on the ISPs without changing the law or going through regulatory
process that was bound to cause a fight. Instead we get a compromise by which the FCC attempts to honor the
original intent of the 2010 Open Internet Order with a new test for
discrimination. That test is the “commercial reasonableness” standard.
Here’s how the FCC wants to do it.If the devil is in the details, here are the details

First, the net neutrality rules that were gutted by the courts made a
distinction between wireline broadband and wireless broadband. For a
history on why, check out this post or this one.
The FCC plans to keep those distinctions intact for the new rules. With
this understanding, let’s hit the three main topics the FCC plans to
cover, saving the most complicated element for last.Transparency: Both the original and the new Open
Internet Order make a provision for transparency, namely that network
operators must share how they are managing their network traffic with
the consumer. This applied to both wireline and wireless networks, so if
your ISP is treating certain traffic differently, it has to tell you.
The FCC’s upcoming documents also ask if this transparency could go
further.When asked if the order could require greater transparency about
company networks such as how congested they might be or if ISPs are
charging for prioritization or access because the market is
uncompetitive, an FCC official said, “The answer is yes.” He added that
the agency believes that greater transparency will help consumers and
the commission determine how the broadband networks are functioning.
That’s a pretty exciting promise if the FCC can wrangle that type of
data from ISPs. Right now, ISPs view that data as competitive and
proprietary.

An AT&T network operations center. How much transparency is enough?

Blocking: The courts struck down the original
order’s anti-blocking provision that said ISPs on wireline networks couldn't block lawful traffic and wireless ISPs couldn't block competing
over-the-top calling and texting services. The new FCC documents will
make the case that because blocking traffic interrupts the “virtuous
cycle” of broadband access — namely that people use broadband because it
gives them access to a variety of services, and because broadband
access is beneficial, anything that makes people less inclined to use
broadband would cause harm.This new reasoning would allow the FCC to implement a no-blocking
position without resorting to calling ISPs common carriers. Another
interesting tidbit here is that the FCC plans to ask about establishing a
baseline of broadband service and view anything that goes below this
baseline as blocking. This might seem esoteric, but in 2007 when Comcast
was interfering with the delivery of BitTorrent packets,
it argued that it wasn't actually blocking them. Instead it was
delaying delivery so the routers in effect dropped the packets and
customers couldn't access their files.

Commercial reasonableness: Here is the heart of last night’s controversy
and where the FCC is walking its finest line. The agency wants to
ensure that the spirit of network neutrality lives on, but legally it
has to use a standard that opens the door to prioritization. The FCC
even seems okay with prioritization in certain cases, with an agency
official offering up the example of packets coming from a connected
heart monitor as a protected class that could be prioritized over other
traffic.However, it will seek to avoid the obvious examples of Netflix having
to pay an ISP to see its traffic priorititzed over another content
provider’s. It will do this using the standards the FCC set forth in a 2011 cell phone roaming order that has been tested in court.
As part of that order, which dictated that mobile carriers have an
obligation to offer roaming agreements to other such providers on
“commercially reasonable” terms, the agency created a class of behaviors
that were commercially unreasonable.

Does this practice have an impact on future and present competition?

How does vertical integration affect any deals and what is the impact on unaffiliated companies?

What is the impact on consumers, their free exercise of speech and on civic engagement?

Are the parties acting in good faith? For example is the ISP involved in a good faith negotiation?

Are there technical characteristics that would shed light on an ISP practice that is harmful?

Are there industry practices that can shed light on what is reasonable?

And finally, a catch all that asks if there are any other factors
that should be considered that would contribute to the totality of the
facts?

Of course, one challenge with this format is that it requires an ISP to behave badly before the FCC can act.
The agency said it will be on the lookout for such violations, it will
accept formal complains and that it will accept informal complaints.
Once a problem is registered the FCC the agency will ask about how it
should handle the complaint, and whether a time limit should be imposed
for a resolution.Finally, the official acknowledged that the agency asks in its
documents if there is ever a reason for a flat prohibition against
certain behaviors even if an ISP isn’t a common carrier. The agency
would have to make the case that paid prioritization is such a consumer
or industry harm that it should be prohibited altogether. But based on
the thinking and attention devoted to the commercial unreasonableness
standard, as well as the heart rate monitor example, it feels like the
FCC isn't keen to walk this path.So these are the topics and questions on which the FCC will vote on
May 15 and, if approved, pass for public comment. At that point the
agency typically offers a 30 or 90-day comment period.

So get ready, internet: the FCC does want to know your stance on this issue.

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I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.